Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

When writing an expression in a Formula tool, I love that you can just type an open bracket and suggestions pop up that allow you to auto-fill the rest of the variable name. What I find frustrating, however, is that once you type the open bracket, the highlighted field automatically moves to the one where your mouse is pointing, regardless of if you have moved your mouse or not. I think it makes more sense to always highlight the first field in the list and only take mouse position into account once it has actually moved.

It is hard to describe in just a picture as opposed to a video but essentially I had my mouse below where I was typing in the screenshot below then when I typed the open bracket, the 3rd field listed automatically got selected even though I never moved my mouse.

Cc: @Hollingsworth 

Is it possible to add sort functionality to the Sample tool in Designer, similar to the 'Sample Based on Order' functionality in the Sample tool in Designer Cloud? This would cut down on the Sort + Sample tool combo in Designer!

Thanks!

• moving or renaming a file after importing it
• deleting a file after importing it
• moving or copying a file after successfully exporting it
• writing a temporary file (i.e. batch file for RunCommand tool), then deleting it when finished

The DateTime tool is a great way to convert various string arrangements into a Date/Time field type. However, this tool has two simple, but annoying, shortcomings :

1. Convert Multiple Fields: Each DateTime tool only lets you convert one field. Many Alteryx tools (MultiField, Auto Field, etc.) allow you to choose what field(s) are affected by the tool.  If I have a database with a large number of string fields all with the same format (such as MM/DD/YYYY), I should be able to use one DateTime tool to convert them all!
2. Overwrite Existing Field: The DateTime tool always creates a new field that contains your converted date/time. I ALWAYS have to delete the original string field that was converted and rename the newly created date/time field to match the original string field's name. A simple checkbox (like the "output imputed values as a separate field" checkbox in the Imputation tool) could give the flexibility of choosing to  have a separate field (like how it is now) or overwrite the string field with the converted date/time field (keeping the name the same).

Alteryx is overall an amazing data blending software. I recognize that both of these shortcomings can be worked around with combinations of other Alteryx tools (or LOTS of DateTime tools), but the simplicity of these missing features demonstrates to me that this data blending tool is not sufficiently developed. These enhancements can greatly improve the efficiency of date handling in Alteryx.

STAR this post if you dislike the inflexibility of the DateTime tool! Thank you!

Please add xlsx files within the onedrive input/output tool

Hello!
I appreciate this is a very underused element of Alteryx Functionality, however, I have noticed a few issues with the description of fields. 

Firstly, if you set a description on a field within a select tool:

And then attempt to clear the description later in the workflow (in another select tool), you cannot. When you delete the description, it will clear back to the original value (in this case, 'test'):

This can be easily recreated, and can be more applicable to yxdb outputs that contain the description of fields. In that scenario, you cannot go back to the previous select tool and remove the description. The closest you can come to easily clearing the description is replacing it with a space ' '.

As a secondary issue, as current the score tool removes field descriptions and overrides the source. For example if I open the Score tool example workflow, and add a select tool/description:

You can see the meta data going into the score tool:

But unfortunately the output of the tool looks like:

Showing that it has completely removes the descriptions, and also replaced all of the 'source' information. My suggestion for this would be that it would not replace the source information or descriptions.

Thirdly - and quite a niche issue, but an int64 field specifically will break when the description differs between the data and the model.

Again, easy to recreate within the Ccore tool example workflow. Apply a Select tool to both streams, setting 'First_Years' to an int64. Within the bottom stream (the model creation), set a description, in this case, 'test':

Make sure to leave the top streams description blank.

Run the workflow, observe the error:
Error: Score (106): Score: The variable testFirst_Years is missing from the input data stream.
Interestingly, it seems to be using the description as part of the name within the Score tool, which is causing issue when the descriptions differ. My suggestion for this would be that it would not utilise descriptions at all.

Kind Regards,

Owen

1. TEXT TO COLUMN TOOL : Check Mark  for “Output/No-Output” next  to  “OUTPUT ROOT NAME”  

Most of the time I don't want/need the column that I parsed. Provide a check box for if you want the root column output. 

I will start off with a story. I have built a process to manage batch API requests. It's an iterative process that checks to see where the export is at by calling an API and then returning some status. It will run and wait and run and wait until the export is ready to be downloaded. However sometimes, the jobs don't finish and a status returns something like "failed" or "cancelled". When this is the case, I have my process (which is a little bit batch macro) kicks off an error message, using the nifty error message tool. After some time I noticed that it was a PAIN to go back and figure out which of my requests failed and I decided that I need to add some messaging around where this was failing, so I could do some easy auditing. So I go back into my tool and much to my chagrin, I cannot pass variables into the message section. I would expect it to have worked something like this:

"Record "+[#2]+" is not 'A'"

Can we please get a change to this. It would save a lot of time and energy if we could create a dynamic error message option.

TL;DR Please allow us to use formulas in the "If expression is true, display error message:" settings area.

Hello,

  After used the new "Image Recognition Tool" a few days, I think you could improve it : 

  > by adding the dimensional constraints in front of each of the pre-trained models,

  > by adding a true tool to divide the training data correctly (in order to have an equivalent number of images for each of the labels)

  > at least, allow the tool to use black & white images (I wanted to test it on the MNIST, but the tool tells me that it necessarily needs RGB images) ?

  Question : do you in the future allow the user to choose between CPU or GPU usage ?

  In any case, thank you again for this new tool, it is certainly perfectible, but very simple to use, and I sincerely think that it will allow a greater number of people to understand the many use cases made possible thanks to image recognition.

  Thank you again

  Kévin VANCAPPEL (France ;-))

  Thank you again.

  Kévin VANCAPPEL

We see canvasses every day where dozens fields are brought into a canvas or a macro, but never used - and this just creates slowness for no good benefit.

Given that one of the selling features of Alteryx is the speed of processing  - could we look at three improvements to the Alteryx engine & designer:

• easiest: Keep track of every field brought in / created - and if they are not used in an output, then throw a warning at the end of the execution process
  • For example - you bring in fields a,b,c - you create field d and e during the flow in formula tools
  • Field d is never used as an input to any filters or formulae - and it doesn't appear on any output - so it's just waste
  • Field a and b are part of the output, so they are fine
  • Field c is never used at all - so that's just waste.
  • Field e is used to filter the records before output - so this one is fine.
  • So we've immediately found 2 fields that we can eliminate and make this canvas faster
• Medium: Ignore the unused fields in the execution engine
• Hardest: Tell the users that their field is unused in Alteryx Designer by doing a lineage analysis of the tools, just like software environments like Visual Studio do.    This may require a change to the engine & to designer 'cause we would need to make each tool capture the full detail of the fields that they know in their configuration in order to do this trace.

As an international organization we deal with clients in multiple-countries.

Name matches for names including Chinese characters generate a unicode conversation warning and are excluded from the fuzzy match.

It would be good if fuzzy match could be enhanced to handle Chinese characters.

Sometimes formulas get pretty long. There are cases of deeply nested conditionals, concatenation of long strings, cases where multiple casts and parses are used, etc. where formulas get pretty large and unwieldy. The current system of wrapping lines and managing the size of the properties pane can be a hassle, especially if you are trying to use any sort of whitespace formatting to make the formulas more readable.

My solution is this is pretty simple, add a pop-out window for formulas. It could be a context menu option from right-clicking the formula box itself, a button on the bar at the top of each formula, or any number of other things.

A really good example of this is MS Access. You can right-click any text box that takes an expression and open it in the expression editor pop-up window. The current system is more like excel where you're stuck with whatever box size you're given.

As of today, you can pass SQL from :
-input tool

-output tool

-connect in-db

The user interface is very limited, the kind of query you can pass also, welll, not very user-friendly. This generates a lot of frustration among users.

What do I suggest :
1/ A direct button "Query Builder" without having to open a new wf and drop an input box and then go with the presql tool and fight to build a query.

2/ Basically the same features than Dbeaver (https://dbeaver.io ) or DBvisualizer (https://www.dbvis.com/) or SQUIRREL http://squirrel-sql.sourceforge.net/ 😞
  -Ability to pass any SQL Code I want (such as update, create, truncate, etc...) when I come from the button, "protected" sql when I am in a workflow
  -autocompletion

  -color coding (The idea is not new )

 
3/ A box "Free Sql Query" that I can branch on a indb or standard wf to pass any SQL query. The Output would be the same as input, just like it would be with a block until done.

We are using silent Alteryx installation and would like to package license activation within the package. We do not want to expose Alteryx license key to the users to prevent them from sharing it with someone else. Requesting to add a flag/setting to allow admins to not display license key under Options>Manage Licenses.

Related request https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Is-it-possible-to-hide-the-serial-key-...

Hello,

Here a use case :

I work on the projects A and B with Alteryx inj IN DB mode.

My coworker works only on project B and have no rights to the data of project A.

When using temporary table in Alteryx, we both create the temporary tables in the default database. The issue is my coworker can see my temporary data of project A, which is not safe.

Solution : allow me to specify the database/schema when I create my temporary table.

Could we please have a Type field added to the "Select Fields to Cleanse" configuration window for the Data Cleansing Tool? This small feature would save a lot of time (saving the time needed to check the Metadata for every field every time I use the Data Cleansing Tool). Similar functionality to the way the Summarize Tool displays both Field and Type (just one additional field).

Today:

Future Version:

Pardon my sad photoshopping 🙂

Note: I realize the Data Cleansing is a macro and this functionality is not currently available with the "Check Box" interface tool.

Thank you!

I am having to render my Alteryx formatted reports to Excel and then upload the report to Google Sheets

It would be very useful (and improve the less well known Alteryx Reporting capabilities) to be able to render straight to a Google Sheet and preserve the formatting.

Thanks

For in-DB use, please provide a Data Cleansing Tool.

Salesforce Input connector tool currently uses REST API.

Can we please enhance this tool to use BULK API?

Use Case:

We are sourcing about 2 million rows of opportunity data from Salesforce do to some insight analysis. This Alteryx workflow takes over an hour to run. The same dataset when pulled using a different ETL tool (Informatica) produces the dataset within 2 min! That makes a HUGE difference when you have a number of process to run in a limited amount of time. Enabling BULK API functionality on Salesforce input tool will help solve this problem.